What To Do With Your Dress

While post-wedding tasks are nothing compared to pre-wedding ones, there’s still a small list of things you need to get done and one the trickier ones is to decide what to do with your wedding dress.

There seems to be three main options:

1. Keep your dress
2.  Sell your dress
3. Trash your dress

That third option has becoming increasingly popular and if that’s your thing and you’ve got some money to burn, hey, go for it, but personally it doesn’t appeal.

OK, there are some amazing trash-the-dress photos out there

Right now I’m debating between option #1 and option #2. Option #2 is definitely the more practical one but it’s also kind of sad. I have to admit that a part of me wants to keep my dress even though I realize that it will likely spend the rest of its life in a box.

I did read somewhere (I think on a blog) about a woman who puts her wedding dress on every year on her birthday (I think she just does this at home and doesn’t wear it one in public).  That’s kind of a fun idea and it does mean that at least your dress is getting out of its box. It also doubles as a sort of weight check.

So maybe I’ll end up doing that. The only thing is that my dress is currently in Alberta. I deliberately left it there after our out-West reception because my parents have way more storage space than Shawn and I do. But at some point it’ll make the trip back to Toronto.

Besides sentimental reasons, the other big reason why I’m not that interested in selling is that it’s a hassle. Both the Canadian Bride and the Wedding Bells forums are packed with dresses for sale so there’s a ton of competition out there, most at great prices.

If you plan on selling your dress, don’t expect to be making even close to your money back. I’ve seen more than a few dresses being offered at around half price and that’s not necessarily including the money that went into alterations and cleaning.

And once you have an interested buyer, she may want to come over and try on the dress and she’ll probably want to negotiate a lower price and really, it just seems like a big pain.

I know I could skip some of that pain by taking my dress to a consignment or second-hand store but the prices those places offer are generally poor unless you have an amazing, big, big name dress.

There is a fourth option I didn’t list above and that’s to donate your dress to The Bride’s Project, an organization that sells used wedding dresses and donates the funds to cancer-related charities, including Wellspring, The Canadian Cancer Society and The Breast Cancer Foundation. The Bride’s Project also accepts and sells accessories such as veils and tiaras.

It really is a great cause and worth looking into if you know you don’t want to keep your dress but aren’t interested in selling or trashing it.